


A tale of stubborness

by parasites_as_big_as_my_arm



Category: The Hobbit, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, he lived!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-04 23:26:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1086924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parasites_as_big_as_my_arm/pseuds/parasites_as_big_as_my_arm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frerin hadn’t thought that the battle would be any different then the others, so with the confidence of the Warrior Prince he had stepped towards it. But it had been different. He had never thought he would survive being taken underground and tortured. But he did, though he doesn’t remember how he came out. He doesn’t care that much about it either. All that he cares about is growing back to his former strength, and leaving the settlement that took him in to go and find his sister, mother, and most importantly, his brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A tale of stubborness

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd or anything, the credit for the name goes to The Almighty Johnsons, Yay Hod, God of all things dark and cold.

Frerin hadn’t thought that the battle would be any different then the others, so with the confidence of the Warrior Prince he had stepped towards it. But it had been different. He had never thought he would survive being taken underground and tortured. But he did, though he doesn’t remember how he came out. He doesn’t care that much about it either. All that he cares about is growing back to his former strength, and leaving the settlement that took him in to go and find his sister, mother, and most importantly, his brother.

 

He couldn’t remember much of it all. It was hard to keep track of anything down there. Frerin had always thought he had been down deep in mountains, he had always thought he had been down so deep in the mines that he had gotten to the centre of the earth. He had been wrong.

Nowhere was a hint of sunlight, or a bit of breeze. The air felt so thick, just barely giving him what he needed to breathe. It was air that had been passed around for years, all it’s nourishment long gone. And it was warm, and cold. It could turn over in just a couple of minutes. Sometimes it was so warm that he thought he would suffocate, or dehydrate. And other times it was so cold that he thought he would freeze to death at night.

And he couldn’t sleep. Well, it wasn’t a matter of being able to fall asleep, it was a matter of staying asleep. They could come in at any hour and throw buckets of water over him, which would wake him up and freeze for the rest of the night, they would make noise and laugh when he begged at them to stop.

And all the ways they had harmed him, purely to pain him had been maddening. He gave in after a couple of weeks and begged for his death, something he had promised himself he would never do. But then death seemed like some form of salvation. Release from it all.

There were few things he remembered clearly. He remembered how his father had held him one night when he had been begging to die for hours, trembling all over from the pain and holding his crushed hand as tightly to his chest as it would allow him. How his father was telling him to be brave and that he was strong, that his ancestors were proud of him and he was proud of him. Of how he one day would see his mother, brother and sister again. That he had to hold on and that he would live, he would be free again once more.

He remembered the intense burning feeling soaring through his body when they had pushed those needles under two of his fingernails and held him down. He remembered watching his fingernails finally rot and fall off.

He remembered clearly of how well they had patched him up after he had gotten that infected wound in his thigh from when they had stabbed down on it with their small daggers. How it had gotten infected and how the fever would have claimed him. How carefully they nursed him back to his powers so they could carry on their game with him.

He remembered when they whipped him for the first time, leaving his back torn open and permanently scarred. He remembered when they had cut off his golden blonde hair that had been his pride and left him with nothing more then what children had. He remembered getting those buckets of ice cold water thrown at him over and over that he thought he would drown. He remembered when he was starving, and there was a goblin sitting out of reach of him, just eating.

He remembered the nights where he had been holding on to that little token his mother had given him on the evening before the his last battle, making him promise that he would come back to her. Thorin had gotten one as well.

He remembered waking up one day and finding his father not breathing. That he was alone.

-       -

 Things had been dark for quite some time before he first saw something again that he could remember. There was light that woke him up and the light was agonizing to his eyes. It burned right through him and set his head in such an ache that it felt like something was trying to claw its way out. But as he had whined and tried to shift away so he wouldn’t have to look at it, he felt that what he was laying on was a lot softer then what it was down in the dungeons.

He could hear a low voice rumbling to someone, and next thing he knew someone had turned down the light and he could see that he was laying with his head against a feather pillow, and the sheets he had over him where warming and stopped his shiver from the cold. The underlay of it was soft and he couldn’t stay wake no matter how hard he tried. It felt like he slept for days.

When he woke up they told him he had.

-       -

It was a little dwarven girl that checked up on him every day and tended to his wounds, switched out the bandages that were needed and gave him soup with all sorts of spices and herbs in them to help him heal better. When he had asked kindly for proper food she had given him a look and burst out laughing. Saying he was allowed proper food when he would be able to keep it down. Frerin had given her a weak smile upon hearing that.

“I’ll accept the challenge.” He had replied to her, so she returned a little while later with proper food and made a bet with him about it. If Frerin won, she said she would tell him her name and would give him a meal every day instead of soup. If Frerin lost, he had to tell her his own name and owed her three favors when he was feeling good enough to stand on his own legs, which she could reclaim anytime she wanted.

After a couple bits of the chicken Frerin thought that it would be an easy task to win, but only a little moment later he felt sick enough to bring the food up on the floor and she had won the bet. She had laughed, patted him on the back and cleaned it all up.

“You owe me your name.” She said while mopping up the floor, nearly finished with her task and Frerin slowly drinking his soup again with trembling hands. The plate of food had disappeared far out of his sight after that and suddenly he didn’t feel that hungry.

“The name is Hod.” Frerin said, taking the first name that spring to mind. He couldn’t tell her his own name. He didn’t even know where he was yet, nor what everybody’s intentions where. He didn’t know how many of his kin had lived the battle, or if they had won at all. He couldn’t risk telling her he was the warrior prince. And Hod, Hod had been a dwarf working in the stables of Erebor which had seen to his pony, or was it the blacksmith who had made his two swords? Frerin couldn’t remember anymore. Erebor seemed so far away.

“Mm, Hod.” She spoke the name slowly, as if tasting it. As if she could taste the lie on it or not, if she could see right through his act, when she looked up with a wide smile and white teeth, Frerin decided she believed him. She was kind of cute, Frerin thought, with her small but stout figure, she was built strongly with rough hands that yet could work so gently with wounds. Dark brown eyes and a bush that she could call hair on top of her head, but it would make his mother itch to get a brush and brush it through. “The name is Cara. Tomorrow the old man will come and have a proper look at you to patch you up. You’re improving, though I would suggest don’t look in a mirror yet, I doubt you even look the slightest of what you’re supposed to look.”

Frerin hadn’t asked any questions to that and finished the soup with herbs and spices, which now seemed much more appetizing after his incident with the chicken. After finishing that mug, he felt heavy as lead again and quickly sank back into a sleep that would remain until he was woken up well in the afternoon the following day.

-       -

It turned out that the old man was the medicus and healer in the mountain (or at least that was where Frerin assumed he was, the walls were made of stone, yet the fresh air was close and there was a window carved out in it, so he had sunlight. The window could be opened, and when he had first heard birds sing again he had burst out into tears once he realized what it was.

The old man was just as his nickname made people assume, old of age. Nearly three hundred years old he boasted, and introduced himself as a dwarf named Farkas, yet he told Frerin to call him the old man.

“Everybody calls me that.” He had said when he was slowly peeling of the bandages wrapped tightly around Frerin’s calf. He couldn’t remember being hurt there, but he hadn’t questioned it.

The old man had white hair and a beard that was undoubtfully envied by many dwarves. He squinted every time he was working with a wound, as if he couldn’t see it properly but he never missed anything and did the job better then any other healer Frerin had ever had before.

“Where am I?” Frerin asked the old man when he was changing bandages by his knee one day, he had been feeling better by each day that passed, he felt stronger and there was no longer a tremble in his hands when he had to pick something up, he had slowly started to eat small portions of ‘real food’ as he called it with Cara’s support. And was able to stay awake whenever she was around to do her cleaning routine.

“Cara hasn’t told you yet then has she?” The old man hadn’t looked at him when he spoke, but had his gaze on the small bottles he carried with him, which Frerin had come to learn that soon he would have a stinging sensation wherever the old man was currently working on.

“I haven’t asked her.” Frerin laid back against the pillows and looked up to the ceiling, hoping that maybe not seeing what the old man would do, would make it hurt a little bit less. “There is so much I haven’t asked, I don’t even know what year it is now.” He chuckled a little bit at that thought, but soon hissed as the awaited sensation on his knee was there.  

“You are on the West side of the Misty Mountains, in a small dwarven colony, and when I say small I do mean it, we are nothing compared to Ered Luin or the Iron hills, in a colony near Eregoin. The year is 2811.”

That made him sixty. Not much time had passed after all, but yet it felt like there had been hundreds of years in between now and the battle of Azanulbizar. Then again it had been hard to measure time at all down there. He couldn’t tell a minute from an hour from a day apart no matter how he tried. “How did you find me?”

“We encounter the odd dwarf, man or elf every now and then by the roads. We are not far of a goblin settlement and occasionally the lucky few get away. You’re one of them, we found you laying by the side of the road at the base of the mountain. If nightfall had come you would have been taken back into the mountain I recon. But don’t you worry about them coming here, we are to far of, nor do we offer anything interesting to their liking. And if they would chose to go for us, we can hold ourselves.” The old man kept talking on as he dressed his knee. Frerin said nothing.

“Can I ask you a question?” The old man asked once he finished dressing Frerin’s knee and looked up, his eyes stopped squinting. Frerin gave a light shrug with his shoulders, as if to indicate for the man to carry on. “What were you before the goblins managed to get their nasty little hands on you. What kind of dwarf were you, every dwarf has a story and now.” He tapped Frerin’s nose with a small medical tool which Frerin had no idea what it was. He flinched backwards a little bit, surprised by the gestures which he had only seen done by parents to their children. “Now, I wish to hear the tale of the Dwarf Hod, who survived against all odds, several times. We thought you were slipping away from us several times actually.”

The old man handed him over a mug with soup, so Frerin propped up his elbows and dragged himself into the best sitting position he could manage and accepted the mug. He could see less spices floating in it, he supposed that was a good thing. He took a small sip and grimaced at the now much more bitter taste, they had changed it up completely he realized. “My Ma used to tell me that I always was hard to kill. I’ve survived a bad case of measles, a fall out of a tree where I didn’t wake up for a week, pneumonia a few years later, fever the year after that.”

The old man had raised one of his bushy white eyebrows as he listened. “I was a sick kid.” Frerin said dismissingly, he had been, but he had also been a kid that had a lot of luck, he couldn’t think of anyone who had taken more tumbles or falls or injuries out of accident that had been life threatening. His brother used to tell him that he was like a mutt puppy trying to keep up with adult dogs, not quite having full control over all of their limbs yet and just rolled over. He didn’t quite get control of his limbs until he joined the army to be trained at the age of fifteen, and even every now and then accidents were still bound to happen.

“I was a soldier of Erebor.” He carried on, not wanting to keep the man waiting much longer. And he hoped that pressuring himself to give the man a story that was as close to the truth as possible, without making him royalty, would make it easier for him to tell. It always had worked that way when he had lied to his parents about the latest mischief he had caused. “I was young when Smaug came, only nineteen years old. We did our best to defend the mountain but.” He chuckled. “But you can’t fight a dragon, no matter how you try.” The old man nodded in an almost understanding way, as if he had been there. But he hadn’t, otherwise Frerin would have recognized him. All he saw in the Old man’s eyes was compassion, not memories.

“So. I wandered around with my kin, town to town looking for work. I guess you could say I wasn’t technically a soldier anymore, no one was. We started a craft in the hopes of making money for the others.” He paused for a moment, it had been a long time of wandering. The soldiers had kept themselves trained to their best extent they could with the few weapons they had left. “Eventually we tried to reclaim Azanulbizar, I was fighting down at the riverbanks, but we were to few and they overtook us, killed most. Me and a few others were dragged down with the Orcs and Goblins for… I’m sure I don’t have to say what. And that’s the story of Hod, I don’t’ even know the verdict of that battle, did we win or did we lose?”

The Old man was quiet for a little while, as if trying to decide on what to say. The longer he stayed quiet the more uneasy Frerin felt, he felt faint, both cold and warm and prayed to the gods that the tremble in his hands would stop.

“They say that they won the battle, but at the same time one can say that they did not. They claimed back Moria. But many died in the process. Their King, Thror, he was among the fallen. Thrain was never found, so Thrain’s soon, Thorin I believe his name was, lead them to victory, He still leads them to this day, but where they are I do not know. Rumor has it that he was most grief struck upon the news that his brother was not found.”

The Old man gathered his things, and Frerin decided on not asking much more. He had expected the news that his grandfather had been slain in battle, in a way he had expected it. He had been ill by the time they had left Erebor, and he had not been at the clearest of minds any time after that. He had even then doubted that his grandfather would ever go back to the clear mind he had once known him to be. But Frerin knew that the chances were big that he had never known his grandfather to be clear of mind.

“In a week or two you will be able to walk around again.” The Old man said after a couple of minutes of silence, as if to break the heavy feeling that was laying on both of them. The awkward silence that Frerin had never been able to handle, yet one he hadn’t noticed until now, he had been to deep in thought. “Then Cara will take you around the settlement for a little while, with a crutch however, so bury your old pride for a while longer. For I can see that, while you might be young, you carry lots of pride within your soul, you are like an animal you, bow to no one unless they are worthy. My advice to you young man, is to bow to this and use a crutch, or you will fall.” 


End file.
